The Ministry of Finance and the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) jointly organised Singapore’s first e-Government Excellence Awards (GEA). Eighteen government services received awards across six categories in a ceremony held earlier today.

The awards aim to recognise the public sector’s achievements in delivering excellent government services to citizens electronically, and encourage improvements across agencies.

Over 90 submissions were received from more than 45 government agencies for the six categories of awards: Websites, e-Services, m-Services, Data Sharing, People Engagement, and Shared System & Services.

A panel of experts from the private sector, including Felix So, Digital Media Editor at Singapore Press Holdings, and Chak Kong Soon, President of the Singapore Computer Society, judged the entries based on their business impact and benefits, alignment to best practices, and innovativeness. Public satisfaction ratings were also taken into account.

The Land Transport Authority (LTA) emerged as the best entry in two categories – m-services, for ‘MyTransport.SG Mobile’, and data sharing. MyTransport.SG Mobile provides commuters with a wide range of information on transportation in Singapore, such as locations of nearest bus stops or taxi stands, bus arrival information, and live traffic images.

“We are moving from ‘government-centric’ to ‘governance-centric’, which encourages us to co-create applications with the public”, said guest of honour Peter Ong, Head of Civil Service. Ong stated that with increasing sophistication in society, with high internet and mobile penetration rates, government organisations need to leverage ICT with a coordinated approach with citizens to raise performance. “Services should not just be available online. They should also be available on mobile platforms”, he said.

Ong also emphasised the importance of opening up government data to the public, and sharing data across agencies. “We need to be more integrated and break down silos to optimise services”, he said. “Open data is a game changer, and if done well, it will transform public services. Today, government agencies have contributed 8000 datasets on our open data portal. LTA’s data has already been used by private developers to create useful apps. We want more efforts like these”.

The complete list of top entries in each category is given below.

Websites: Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources (MEWR) - MEWR Website

The Ministry of Finance and the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore IDA jointly organised Singapore’s first e-Government Excellence Awards GEA Eighteen government services received awards across six categories in a ceremony held earlier today